


Achromatic

by captainmistyknight (vicspeaks)



Category: Marvel Noir
Genre: "colorblind until you meet your soulmate" AU, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Getting Together, M/M, adventuring through the jungle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-26
Updated: 2020-06-26
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:42:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24922516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vicspeaks/pseuds/captainmistyknight
Summary: "Steve’s life ended the moment he was born, according to the doctor’s at least. Of course, it took them awhile to figure it out, but when he was three years old, his Ma realized that on top of all the other issues he had to deal with, his eyes weren’t responding properly to light. She took him to the doctors to get tested, and they spoke his doom.He was permanently colorblind. An achromat. He’d never know love."A story of growing up, misunderstandings, and love in the jungle.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 22
Kudos: 116
Collections: Stony Loves Steve 2020





	Achromatic

**Author's Note:**

  * For [firebrands](https://archiveofourown.org/users/firebrands/gifts).



> So uh, my brain accidentally took a bunch of your prompts and blended them together into a fanfic smoothie. I hope you like the result!

Steve’s life ended the moment he was born - according to the doctor’s at least. Of course, it took them a while to figure it out, but when he was three years old, his Ma realized that on top of all the other issues he had to deal with, his eyes weren’t responding properly to light. She took him to the doctors to get tested, and they spoke his doom.

Colorblind.

Of course, colorblindness itself wasn’t a problem. The nature of rods and cones had been fully understood thirty years ago. Everyone knew that you only started seeing colors once you met the person whose entire being was perfectly compatible with your own--your soulmate, some called it. But according to those doctors, Steve was never going to be able to see color, not even if he met his soulmate.

He was permanently colorblind. An achromat. He’d never know love.

Steve dutifully hid this information from everyone throughout his childhood. He didn’t know why the fact that he couldn’t see colors was a problem since everyone he knew couldn’t see them either, except Jackie Sullivan and Bridget O’Donnell from down the lane, whose parents were best friends and who had been able to see colors from the minute they locked eyes. But he knew he needed to obey his Ma, and he kept his secret, even from the teachers and the pastor.

He didn’t really have many friends all the same, ‘cause his sickness kept him in bed so often that he barely went to school. His Ma did her best to make sure he knew his reading and his sums, but beyond that, he didn’t get much proper schooling while he was at home. So his teachers kept him back for what they called “remedial lessons” during recess. And even when he did get to play, they always picked him last for sports ‘cause he was so weak. 

His only friend was Arnie Roth, another loner who “stuck up for the little guy” (his words, not Steve’s). He could be a little too loud, and a little cocky, but he made up for all of that whenever he came ‘round with a new Marvels mag, because Marvels was just about the best damn thing Steve had ever seen in his life. Well, correction: Tony Stark was just about the best damn thing Steve had ever seen in his life.

Tony Stark was a man’s man, only a few years older than Steve and already making a name for himself as an adventurer and scholar, ‘cause his adventures were real. The newspapers had less sensational versions of his biggest finds in print. Steve still couldn’t believe a guy could make a living by running through old temples in the middle of jungles. It sounded like a dream. And Tony…

The guy was clever, that’s a fact. He was always getting out of scrapes by the skin of his teeth, solving complex math equations to open secret cave doors, making salves out of berries miles out of the way to cure snake bites. Not to mention his gadgetry...wow…  
He was smart, charming, if the number of women who showed up in the mag were to be believed, and just. So kind! He always stopped to help random townspeople with their work, made friends wherever he went. He was exactly the kind of man Steve wanted to be. Deep down, quietly, Steve thought he was the kind of man he wanted, full stop. 

Steve’s love of Marvels kept him going through school. Until the war came and school suddenly wasn’t as important as proving yourself a man on the front. Steve had been designated 4F the minute he tried to enlist, but he kept on trying. If Tony could contribute to the war effort as a 4F, so could he. 

Seven attempts later, he finally got his big break, and once again, it was Marvels that changed his life for the better. An editor of the magazine managed to catch a glimpse of his sketches on some ads he drew up for a local grocer, and hired him as an inker. He moved up the ranks quickly, of his own merit no less (turns out reading so much Marvels really helped him internalize the style, and well...he’s had a lot of practice drawing Tony). 

It helped that more and more, able-bodied men were being pulled away from their desks to serve their country. Steve watched those men as they packed up their belongings with thinly veiled jealousy, until finally, finally it was his turn, though not in the way he’d expected.

Tony Stark personally asked for him (well, “the one who makes my eyes sparkle like I know everything,” but still, him!) to accompany him on a series of new missions to find artifacts the Allies could use to boost their standing in the war. They were to be accompanied by a rotating cast of crewmembers, and it was Steve’s job to document the adventures so they could be published once they were declassified.

So basically he was being paid to live out his childhood dreams.

Steve still remembers the moment he and Mr. Stark--no, Tony had met for the first time. His flight (his flight! He was in a plane!) had just landed on the tarmac. Mr. Stark, who was still just Mr. Stark at the time, had run up to them waving his arms in an exuberant hello. He and Steve had locked eyes as he got out of the plane--

The world had fallen away, and something unidentifiable had felt unquestionably different. Mr. Stark had smiled at him, beautiful and bright as always, but his eyes had been tinged with a joy, a vulnerability he hadn’t seen in them since. 

“I can’t believe it’s you,” Tony had breathed, hurried and quiet as though desperate not to shift the spell that had overcome them with his words. “It’s been so long, I--”

“Good afternoon, Mr. Stark. My name is Steve Rogers. I’m here to be your personal sketch artist,” Steve said, as he stretched out a hand to shake.  
He had rehearsed some variation of those words nearly seven hundred times on the flight over, but they still had appeared to be the wrong ones. The light in Mr. Stark’s eyes had dimmed slightly, the corners of his lips had made as though to move downward, but as soon as it had appeared any sign of discomfort had been gone. A smile just as bright, but leaps and bounds more professional was plastered across Tony’s face where astonished wonder had been before. Steve had tried not to mourn the loss. 

“Mr. Stark was my father--” his voice cracked on the word “--call me Tony or I’ll fire you,” Mr--Tony had replied, taking Steve’s hand. 

A warm, pleasant sizzle had coursed through his veins at the contact, it had taken all his strength not to shiver despite the jungle heat. “Tony it is, then. Thank you so much for the opportunity. I’ve always wanted to meet you.”

“Really?” Tony had said with a laugh. “Well, have I lived up to expectations?”

“And more,” Steve had replied with a grin. “I used to love pretending to go on adventures with you as a kid. If you could do it with your heart, then I could learn multiplication tables, even if pneumonia kept me out of the classroom. I still can’t believe I’ll be helping share your incredible story with the world.”

Tony had looked at him as though seeing him for the first time. “Well--Steve, was it? In that case, I think we’ll get along just fine.”

And they had! They had taken to one another as though they had always known each other, and were only reuniting after a time apart. It hadn’t taken Steve long to forget what it was like before Tony had been at his side, cracking stupid, crass jokes about cadavers or jokingly calling him an idiot because he couldn’t do trigonometry in his head. Though the crew came and went, Tony had become his constant, and he wouldn’t have traded these adventures for the world, even if they never found anything.

Back then, it had seemed as though they never would. 

No one had told Steve just how much failure went into each of Tony’s successes. Their crew dwindled as more and more men grew disappointed by the lack of fame, and more importantly, capital Tony had to offer with every bust of a mission. Steve had to give more than one man a dressing down after they tried to start a petty, stupid fight. He wasn’t proud, exactly, to say he’d made more than one grown man cry with his words, but the quietly pleased look Tony gave him every time left him warm like nothing else.

“You know, you can quit like all the others if you want to. You should be doing something valuable with your time, making a name for yourself in the art world, not languishing in some dumb forest halfway across the world with me.” Tony had finally said to Steve after one notable failure.

Steve had replied, of course, “No, thank you. I’m fine where I am.”

“Are you really? You haven’t drawn anything usable in weeks, and I know you get paid by the issue, not the hour. Sure, we take care of you here, but what about when we go back home and you have no nest egg to fall back on? What about when Marvels dies out, because at this rate you know it will, and my reference will mean nothing to anyone, and you’ll have to scrape your way up the corporate ladder from the bottom again? What then, Steve? Will you finally resent me the way you should, then?” Tony was breathing heavily by the time he’d finished, genuinely angered by Steve’s seeming lack of care for his own wellbeing.

Steve, in turn, had taken a little time to give Tony’s words the consideration they deserved before responding. “I’m fine where I am. I get the chance to practice my sketches and have seen a lot of improvement that I’m really proud of. I get to talk to neat people from around the world, and learn their stories and faces. When I get back home, I’ll publish the profiles I got permission to publish, and show as many people as I can that the world is so much bigger than we all think, even when our government is trying to make us believe it’s ‘us vs. them’. I get to see the man who was my hero and is now my best friend work his magic every day, and to put a smile on his face whenever I can. Sure, the air is muggy so my asthma acts up, and I’m surprised I haven’t caught a horrible disease out here with my immune system, but I think I’m really happy here.”

Tony had just looked at him for a long, long time. Then, he’d pulled out a hand-held radio and said, “Erskine, I think we’ve found our guy.” 

“Roger that,” came the reply.

And that’s how Steve found out about the Super-Soldier program. A top-secret response to the Nazi’s increasingly brilliant scientific advances (and boy did Tony close up whenever anyone brought that up). Steve had apparently been chosen to be the first test subject.

(“You’ll have to leave me behind when you get all muscly,” Tony had said. “You’ll be put on the front lines fighting the real threats.”

“I won’t leave you behind, even if they send me to the Front the minute they can,” Steve had replied. “Wild horses couldn’t keep me away.”

Tony had hugged him after that, and Steve had never wanted to leave)

“The serum, it amplifies what’s inside a person already, good or bad,” Dr. Erskine, one of the masterminds behind the Rebirth process, had explained. “We asked Tony to take some men we had thought were good candidates on a series of wild goose chases, to see how they reacted at their absolute lowest. Of all those men, you were the only one who stayed patient. You were the only one who stayed kind. You are the only person who could take the serum and stay the kind of man we need to win this war-- a good man, with a good heart, not a good soldier.”

Steve hadn’t had anything to say to that, but fortunately for him, Dr. Erskine could read into the silence.

So here he was. Tomorrow, he’d step into Tony’s Vita-Ray chamber with Dr. Erskine’s serum coursing through his veins. Tomorrow he’d be in a world of pain, hoping against hope he’d be what everyone wanted him to be. 

Today, he sat on the roof of the facility, looking at the stars, so engrossed in his thoughts he didn’t hear the footsteps behind him.

“Mind if I join you?” Tony asked.

Steve patted a place beside him, and felt rather than saw Tony sit down. “My Ma used to tell me the stories of the constellations, when I had the strength to look in a book. We couldn’t see the stars real well back home, but she used to watch for comets all the time back in Ireland.”

“My dad--” his voice only cracks a little bit on the word this time “--used to read me the Greek legends as bedtime stories. Then we’d look at the stars and he’d quiz me on astronomy.

“It sounds like you love him a lot,” Steve said, quietly.

“I did. I do. I never told him enough when I had the chance,” Tony replied, then sighed. “That’s actually why I’m here.”

Steve turned to face Tony. “I’m listening.”

“Travelling the world with you has been, well, the best experience of my life. You’ve taught me so much, and I hope I’ve helped you in kind in some way. You’re one of the best men I know, Steve, and, well, I’m really glad that you were the one who gave me my colors. I couldn’t have asked for a better one-way soulmate. I wanted to make sure you knew that, in case things went south tomorrow.”

Steve blinked twice. “I gave you your colors? Why didn’t you tell me? You must have felt so confused...and alone! I’m so sorry, Tony, I--”

“No, no, you don’t need to apologize for a one-way bond. It’s neither of our faults--just the universe having a laugh. It’s fine, Steve, I made my peace long ago. Just your friendship has meant more to me than anything else I’ve ever had. I don’t want to make it seem like I’m guilting you into anything, especially when you don’t feel the same way.”

“But I do, Tony! I always have. It’s just that…”

“You have another soulmate. I get it.”

“No, no! Well, I don’t actually know. I’ll never know. I’m colorblind, Tony.”

“Yeah, but not forever!”

“Permanently colorblind. The doctors told my Ma I was an achromat when I was three, and I haven’t told anyone--until now, that is. People tend to treat you different when they think you have no soul.”

“So then, when we saw each other for the first time--”

“Nothing happened for me, because nothing could happen.” Steve sighed. “Tony I can’t guarantee your bond isn’t one way, but I sure as hell can say your feelings aren’t. I love you. I think I’ve loved you since you were a poorly inked person in a magazine.” Tony chuckled at that. “And then it turned out you were kind, and funny, and just as clever as the mags made you out to be, and I was just lost. We don’t have to do anything. I don’t think I’m ever gonna be able to give you the bond you want, but if we’re doing last confessions, well, there’s mine.”

Tony gaped at him. “Like hell we’re not gonna do anything, Steve! You love me! I love you! Why aren’t we kissing already?”

Steve laughed. “So all those dames in the mags weren’t just editor’s adding drama?”

“I can’t say I haven’t, well, toured the world on that front. I understand if that makes you uncomfortable,” Tony said with a blush.

Steve shook his head. “I’m glad you lived your life to the fullest, Tony. You deserve to be happy.”

“How did I ever get lucky enough to land a fella like you?” asked Tony, as he stretched out a hand to Steve’s cheek. He stopped just before making contact.

Steve grabbed Tony’s hand between his own and brought it to his face. “I think I’m the lucky one. Now are you gonna kiss me or what?” They met each other halfway. 

The kiss was the heat in the center of a jungle, the sweetness of strange fruits and the promise of more yet to come. It tasted like the best adventure of Steve’s life.

Come hell or high water, achromat or not, Steve wasn’t letting Tony go for the world.

**Author's Note:**

> So I’m p sure MCU Steve was canonically color blind and that got cured during Rebirth, so if it floats your boat you can imagine the joy of Steve coming out of the chamber, Tony gently touching a pectoral before looking into Steve’s eyes, and Steve’s world bursting with color. They will cry a little bit in each others’ arms, secure in the knowledge they will never more be parted.
> 
> I’m learning to grow comfortable with unconventional sweetness though, so in my head the serum probably does nothing because it could find nothing to fix. This is just the way Steve is, and he and Tony find their happiness not in spite of that but because of that. Either ending is fine, but I wanted to keep things ambiguous because life be like that sometimes. 
> 
> Tony will start making jokes about Steve’s terrible sense of fashion in both endings though.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
